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Abstract: This article intends to offer a panoramic view of key names of modern and
contemporary Portuguese literature from a fear perspective. At first, we present the
reasons for the focus on the emotion as a theme and as an inherent element of literary
creation. The limitations and difficulties of such approach are hereafter discussed. Finally,
based on Portuguese names – but not only –, we develop how fear ambivalently integrates
itself to literary works as a cause and effect of writing. Highlighting fear, especially
in contemporaneity, means a protection of the transit of affects and a resistance to
impoverishment and / or mechanization of experience.
Keywords: Portuguese Literature. Emotions. Fear.
“O medo é um fotograma entre outros.”
Luis Quintais.
1 Tradução nossa de “tendency of some scientists to equate brain states, detected via neuroimaging,
with emotion itself” e “self-representational capacity enables people to project themselves into the
future and into the past”.
2 Tradução nossa de “the very act of narrating changes and formulates ‘experience’”.
3 Tradução nossa de “let us agree to a moratorium on the use of single words, such as fear […] and
write about emotional process with full sentences rather than ambiguous naked concepts”.
4 Tradução nossa de “For every object designed with safety in mind, there is a corresponding fear.
Conversely, for almost every fear, there is at least one object designed to allay the apprehension. Fear
is a powerful motor of invention” e “Especially in everyday life, security is an industry in constant
expansion, because, since there is no end to what could go wrong, there is also no end to the creative
and commercial possibilities design can offer”.
5 Tradução nossa de “The contemporary built environment contains increasingly less meaningful
public space, and existing public space is increasingly controlled by various forms of surveillance and
increasingly invested with private meaning”.
6 Tradução nossa de L’écrivain: un phobique qui réussit à métaphoriser pour ne pas mourir de peur
mais pour ressusciter dans le signes” e “l’assurance dans laquelle nous tient d’ordinaire l’usage auto-
matique de la parole, assurance d’être nous-mêmes”.
7 Tradução nossa de “I came frightened into the world and lived in perpetual fear of life and of
people” e “the fear of life that has raged in me since thought entered my mind”.
8 Tradução nossa de “I don’t want to get rid of illness, however unsympathetically I may depict it
in my art… My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship
without rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different to others. My sufferings are part
of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.
I want to keep those sufferings”.
9 Tradução nossa de “fear produced an art that outlasts itself, disconnected from the impulses that
created; it becomes a fear itself, an autonomous anxiety”.
10 Tradução nossa de “Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I
was trying to to dissect souls”.